Welcome back to the Gubba Podcast. I'm Gubba, a first time homesteader following in the footsteps of my homesteading forebears. I discuss everything from homesteading to prepping and everything in between. Today, we are going to be discussing a hot topic, the Bible events taking place here in America. Yes, you heard me. I have mentioned this a few times in my conspiracy videos online and people think I'm either being blasphemous or that I'm Mormon. And I'm saying no, like I think the city of Jerusalem that Jesus walked was here in America, old world Egypt wasn't in the middle East and it was here in America, Moses floated down a river here in America, not the modern day Nile in Africa.
And yes, you are hearing me right. When you start diving into the World Fairs, which I have an episode on, you realize that our history is a lie. Not only our history, but our maps. They are all one big fat lie to keep us contained and confused. There is a reason they destroy these old evidences.
Imagine standing alone on the shore of the Great Salt Lake at dusk. The air is sharp with minerals; the water stretches out like a sheet of hammered metal; the mountains loom like ancient ramparts on every side. If you shut off everything you’ve ever been taught about where Bible stories took place and just let the land speak, it starts whispering something unnerving: this doesn’t just feel like Utah. This feels like scripture. This feels like a lost Holy Land.
In this episode, I want to lean all the way into that heretical thought. What if the real stage for much of the Bible wasn’t in the modern Middle East at all, but right here in what we call the American West? What if Utah, specifically, is not just coincidentally similar to ancient Judea, but actually is the land those stories came from? What if Salt Lake City sits where Jerusalem once stood, its streets laid over buried walls and forgotten pools? And what if that same system that tells us to look thousands of miles away for “holy ground” has also kept us from noticing hieroglyphs in the desert, Egyptian traces in our canyons, and a psychological program designed to make us doubt the evidence of our own eyes?
Everything in this theory begins with geography, because geography is the one thing that’s hardest to fake. Ancient Judea is described as a highland plateau with a deep rift valley running alongside it, holding a freshwater lake in one section and a hypersaline “Salt Sea” further down, the two connected by a river called the Jordan. Utah, if you strip away the state lines and place names, checks almost every one of those boxes. You have a mountain-backed plateau along the Wasatch Front, a deep basin holding Utah Lake and the Great Salt Lake, and a river between them literally called the Jordan. The ancient Sea of Galilee is a freshwater lake framed by hills, feeding the Jordan River, which then flows into the Dead Sea, a landlocked, intensely salty body of water where you can float without sinking. Utah Lake is a shallow but broad freshwater lake framed by mountains, feeding the Jordan River, which then runs into the Great Salt Lake—one of the saltiest terminal lakes on Earth. Hydrologists at one point even published a comparative study noting “physiographic, geologic and hydrologic similarities” between the Jordan River Valley in Utah and the Jordan River Valley of the Holy Land, because both are closed-basin systems where fresh water runs into a salt sea in a rift-like valley.
Now, critics will say, sure, that’s an interesting parallel, but salt lakes and river-fed basins show up in many places. Fair. But then the naming starts to get weird. Modern theologians and historians like to say, “Well, settlers just slapped biblical names on their new surroundings,” as if these words were randomly pulled from a hat. Yet early pioneer journals and later articles out of Utah admit that the land itself reminded people of the Holy Land, which is why names like Jordan River, Moab, Salem, Ephraim, and Goshen appeared so quickly in that one region and not elsewhere on the frontier.
When the geography, water patterns, and valley structure already look like the Bible, and then the people moving into it “just happen” to feel compelled to name everything after the Bible, it starts to sound less like branding and more like memory—either conscious or buried.
Then there’s the sound of the word Utah itself. Utah just happens to sound like “Judah,” the biblical tribal land that held Jerusalem. Say them slowly: Utah… Judah. The vowel shift is minimal; the rhythm is the same. Linguists will insist this is nothing. But in a theory that’s all about geographic echoes, the state’s name sounding like the very tribe that held the original Holy City is another little stone on the same pile.
If Utah is Judah in this conspiracy map, then you have to ask: where is Jerusalem? This is where Salt Lake City strides into the frame. Ancient Jerusalem, in older textual reconstructions, sits not at the southern tip of the Salt Sea but on a highland overlooking the basin, near the northwestern rim of the salt lake system and backed by higher mountains. Salt Lake City is perched on a plateau overlooking the southeastern edge of the Great Salt Lake, backed by the Wasatch range. It functions as a religious capital, a gathering place, a symbolic “city on a hill,” ringed with temples and laid out in a grid that early observers compared to sacred geometry. It fills the same structural role for its region that Jerusalem did for Judea: the city where religious and cultural power concentrates, set between mountain and salt.
But what if the resemblance goes deeper than symbols? Early construction in downtown Salt Lake supposedly turned up foundations that didn’t fit any known Native or pioneer style—stone-lined rooms, walls running at strange angles under the main grid, and large mounds that were quietly leveled as streets and buildings went in. The official line is that these were natural features or crude indigenous structures, but that raises another question: why weren’t they fully documented before being destroyed? In a world that treasures archaeology everywhere else, how does a region so obsessed with biblical symbolism and ancient roots somehow fail to take a serious look at major subterranean anomalies in its own capital? That’s the kind of silence that smells like someone, somewhere, decided it was better not to know.
From here, fringe researchers push bolder claims: that somewhere under the modern city, along forgotten watercourses and buried springs, lies the original Pool of Bethesda—the very pool from the New Testament where the sick gathered; where, according to the story, a man lame for decades stepped in after being told to “take up thy bed and walk.” In Salt Lake folklore, there are whispers of a condemned building downtown, sealed off for “structural reasons,” beneath which workers once found an old stone basin with steps descending into it, carved in a style unlike anything else in the area. Rather than excavate and risk rewriting history, the story goes, the site was closed, the building shuttered, and the rumor allowed to drift into that hazy zone where “urban legend” and “cover-up” meet. Not confirmed, not denied—just quietly forgotten. Check out on Wall Street the old Warm Springs Park and pools.
The same pattern appears in the supposed “Wall of Jericho” out West. The biblical Jericho is famous for its walls—fortifications that supposedly “fell down flat.” Archaeologically, the traditional Jericho site in the modern Middle East has been a headache for scholars, because the destruction layers and dates don’t line up neatly with the biblical timeline. Meanwhile, in parts of Utah and the surrounding Intermountain West, there are reports of odd circular earthworks, ramparts, and collapsed stone embankments that don’t match known indigenous structures and don’t match simple erosion, either. Most have been bulldozed, mislabeled, or written off as “geologic oddities,” but on old surveys and aerial photos, people claim you can trace outlines that look suspiciously like defensive rings around now-dry springs and ancient lake margins. If you’re already entertaining the notion that Utah is Judah, it’s not a big leap to imagine that one of those ringed sites—reconfigured by time, earthquakes, erosion—might be the original Jericho, long buried, renamed, and stripped of its story. Check out Paul Bunyan's woodpile and keep in mind the walls collapsed from frequency.
Then we widen the lens. If Israel’s stories might be rooted on this continent, what about Egypt’s? This is where the Grand Canyon walks into the conspiracy, dragging a century-old mystery behind it. In 1909, the Arizona Gazette ran a front-page story about a man named G. E. Kincaid who supposedly discovered a hidden cave complex high in the walls of the Grand Canyon, filled with mummies, statues, and hieroglyphs that looked Egyptian or “Oriental.” The article claimed the Smithsonian was involved in a major excavation and that the cave contained multiple chambers, granaries, and lined tunnels linking room after room of artifacts. It explicitly suggested this discovery would link the Nile to the Colorado, Egypt to Arizona.
Mainstream historians and the Smithsonian now flatly say the whole thing was a hoax—yellow journalism from a long-dead newspaper, with no records of “Prof. Jordan” or “G. E. Kincaid” in any institutional archive. Later investigations showed no follow-ups in other serious papers; the article used “Smithsonian Institute” instead of “Institution,” a tell for inauthenticity; and the canyon’s archaeologists insist no such Egyptian cave has ever been documented.
That’s the official verdict.
But in conspiracy circles, the Grand Canyon cave is Exhibit A that Egypt was possibly here, and that any evidence of that has been aggressively buried. The argument goes like this: the cave was real; the artifacts were real; and once certain powers realized what it meantthey pulled everything up, shut it down, and rewrote the story as a “hoax.” The fact that the canyon has buttes named Isis Temple and Horus Temple only adds spice to the stew; official park literature says these names were just part of a late-nineteenth-century fad for classical and mythological themes, but to conspiracists, they feel like an inside joke: little Egyptian bills slipped between the pages of an American book.
And the Grand Canyon isn’t the only place where “Egypt in America” leaks through the cracks. There are other claims—like the infamous Burrows Cave in the Midwest, where one man insisted he found chambers filled with coins, carvings, and artifacts bearing a strange mixture of Egyptian and Mediterranean styles. Most archaeologists classify Burrows Cave as pure fraud; the artifacts don’t match known Egyptian styles, and the discoverer refused transparent access.
Even the modern “monoliths” that popped up around Utah recently have played with Egyptian imagery—one near Cedar City reportedly contained a little drawer with a piece engraved with the eye of Ra, like a wink from somewhere deep in the cultural basement.
Is all of this proof that ancient Egyptians were in America? No. But as a pattern, it feeds the suspicion that someone, somewhere, is very invested in keeping certain possibilities labeled “impossible.” The entire story of “Old World” and “New World” collapses. And with that collapse, the authority of every institution that has built itself on managing those categories would crack.
This is where the psychological angle becomes as important as the archaeology. If you wanted to hide a people’s true origin or disconnect them from their ancient homeland, you wouldn’t just bury artifacts; you’d rewrite their mental map. You’d teach them that their land and most importantly, their Creator.
You’d flood them with museum displays and Bible maps that frame the Holy Land as a far-off tourist destination instead of something that might be mirrored—almost down to the mile—in the valley they drive through every day.
Orwell wrote about this in 1984, where the Party’s final and ultimate demand was that people learn to reject the evidence of their own senses and replace it with whatever the authorities said was true. You didn’t just have to say two plus two equals five; you had to believe it felt right. In this context, the conspiracy says that Americans have been taught to look at Utah’s Jordan River, salt sea, freshwater lake, and mountain city and see “just another Western landscape,” even when the pattern matches biblical geography point for point. We’ve been trained to shrug off stories about torched mounds and sealed basements and Egyptian-looking caves as hoaxes or misunderstandings, even when the same types of stories would cause instant global frenzy if they emerged in Italy or Israel. The trick isn’t just censorship. It’s disorientation. Make people unsure of what they’re seeing, and they’ll eventually stop trusting themselves and only trust the narrative.
So where does that leave us, staring out across the Great Salt Lake with a conspiracy map in one hand and a Bible in the other? On the surface, the safe answer is that this is all coincidence and myth-making. The mainstream archaeological consensus is clear: no credible evidence places biblical Jerusalem or Jericho or the Pool of Bethesda in Utah, and the Grand Canyon Egyptian cave is almost certainly a 1909 newspaper hoax amplified by the internet age.
That’s the official line, and we should hear it and weigh it honestly.
But there’s another layer, and that’s the layer of pattern and intuition and the way land speaks. You don’t have to swallow the whole theory to admit that Utah’s geography eerily parallels ancient descriptions, that its place names and spiritual role carry a strange resonance with Judah, that there have been curious finds and quick cover-ups in both canyon walls and city foundations, that Egyptian imagery keeps reappearing in the American West like a ghost that hasn’t quite finished its business. You can acknowledge that without pretending it’s all neatly explained.
Maybe the real value of this theory isn’t in “proving” that Salt Lake City is literally Jerusalem or that the walls of Jericho are crumbling in some Utah gulch. Maybe the value is in what it exposes: how quickly we accept the maps we’re handed; how rarely we question the story about where our sacred things happened; how easily we’re persuaded to treat our own land as spiritually empty and someone else’s as holy. The deserts and mountains here hold secrets, whether or not they’re the exact secrets this theory claims.
I’m here to say: look harder. Don’t just stare at someone else’s map and call it truth. Walk the shores of the Great Salt Lake and ask yourself why this sea feels like the stories you were told about another one. Drive the road between Utah Lake and Salt Lake and notice how the valley flows; think about the Jordan that links the two. Look up at the mountains and ask whether they really are just “rock,” or whether some part of you recognizes them from stories that were supposedly born on another continent. Read about that 1909 article, the canyon cave, the hieroglyphs, the mummies, and notice how fast institutions rush to say “hoax” and how slowly they move when inconvenient discoveries surface anywhere that might threaten the official storyline.
Maybe Utah is Judah. Maybe Salt Lake City really is built, brick by brick, over a much older city that once went by another name. Maybe Jericho’s fallen walls are hiding in plain sight in some eroded ring of earth we’ve been told is “just geology.” Maybe the Pool of Bethesda is tucked under a condemned Salt Lake building, its stone steps filling slowly with groundwater and dust while the world above pretends it never existed. Maybe Egypt was here and our maps are lies to keep us confused. Or maybe none of that is literally true—but the fact that we can’t even safely ask the question without being laughed at tells you everything you need to know about who gets to write history.
Either way, as someone who lives with their hands in the soil, I’ll say this: the land remembers. Even when books lie, even when newspapers hoax, even when institutions bury and rename and gaslight, the land keeps its own record. If you want to know what really happened, sooner or later you have to shut the textbook, step outside, and listen.